How do you maintain your public computers?
Librarians want to know.
Librarians want to know.
Something is brewing in Montana, and it's showing up on the newswires. I just came across two terrific stories worth sharing about Montana libraries and public computers.
The first piece practically yelled, Sarah, spread the world about this library's free wifi! And so I will... from The Montana Standard:
People who don’t have a home computer or Internet service no longer have an excuse to avoid surfing the Web.
The Butte-Silver Bow Public Library, 226 W. Broadway, has eight public computers and free Wi-Fi service available for use at no cost and without the need for a library card.
'We want to let people know we have it,' said Lee Phillips, director.
In addition to local residents, Phillips is hoping that Butte’s many festival-goers this summer will take advantage of the public computers and free Wi-Fi." read more
Free wireless is such a tremendous resource for libraries, especially those that have increased usage during tourist seasons. What a boon to be advertised in the paper, too! Perhaps the Butte-Silver Bow Public Library should take it one step further and take a fellow Montanan's sage advice of advertising their wifi on one of these handy sites.
And then, as if covering the recent news at Butte-Silver Bow Public Library wasn't enough, the Great Falls Public Library was spotlighted in a piece today in the Great Falls Tribune:
Nationwide, the number of people using libraries rose by 10 percent between 2002 and 2006.
'We're way beyond that,' Heckel said [Jim Heckel, Director]. Visits to the Great Falls Public Library numbered 183,257 in 2002, and 226,594 in 2006, a jump of nearly 25 percent.
'We've consciously gone out of our way to make it easy for people to come to the library for something they want,' Heckel said.
A big chunk of information available on the Internet is not free, Heckel noted, but libraries can band together to provide free information. The Great Falls library provides access to health studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine, for instance, or access to magazine articles, graphics and photographs from about 40,000 magazines, either at the library or through its Web site." read more
To learn about another Montanan library doing great work, check out a Spotlight we published on Renee Goss, from Sidney-Richland County Library.
Keep up the impressive work, Montana!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Tell us about your daily routine maintaining public computers, or a moment when you were particularly proud. Don't forget that what might be "that's nothing" to you may be an "aha!" to someone else!
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